Thom Addington (PY) (he/him) is a queer, Catholic, rural Southern writer with Appalachian roots raised on Rappahannock land in King & Queen County, Virginia. He writes about obsession, myth, family, religion, and animals. If pressed for a patchwork of representative things he loves, Thom would choose: the TV adaptation of Fleabag, Ensemble Organum's recording of Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame, Nicole Tong's How to Prove a Theory, Spotty Dog RVA's Salty Chocolate Chip Cookie ice cream, and Uptown New Orleans.

Sarah Parker Beasley (CNF/PY) is a Richmond-based arts professional whose work focuses on storytelling, public engagement, and visual culture. Born and raised in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, she moved to Richmond in 2012 to earn her BFA in Photography + Film with a minor in Art History from VCUarts. She currently serves as the Constituent Engagement Manager at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, where she contributes to fundraising strategy and donor relations. Her background includes roles at The Branch Museum of Design, 1708 Gallery, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Her writing is informed by a sustained interest in interconnectivity, memory, and the narratives embedded in everyday life.

Alexa Benhart (FC, she/her) grew up along the East Coast writing stories about talking animals, and she hasn’t stopped since. After receiving an English degree from VCU in the throes of COVID, she found solace in nature, community, and the collective storytelling zeitgeist of tabletop gaming. Her work often combines themes of queer identity and belonging with the mystical, curious, and strange. When not writing, she is usually taking care of her and her fiancée’s four cats, three horses, and hamster. 

Caroline Gunn (CNF/FC) was born in New York City and spent the first six years of her life moving back and forth between New Jersey, the Catskills, and New York City. When she was six, she moved to a house on a mountain outside of Charlottesville where she lived until she went to Oberlin for one year. Ohio was too cold, so she decided to take a gap year. Fate brought her to Richmond via a girl on Facebook Marketplace seeking to sublease an ugly room in a beautiful house. She fell in love with the city, started a girl band, and decided to attend VCU where she received her BA in English with a minor in Creative Writing in 2026. She writes about all the usual things: childhood, loss, illness, and what it means to be in a dying body on a dying planet. She has a diabetic cat named Daisy and loves reading, seeing good bands, writing songs, and riding her bike very fast.

Han (Hannie) Raschka (Dual Genre: Poetry/CNF) is currently inhabiting the Driftless Region for just a little while longer before hopping over to Richmond. After ten years in and out of school, they completed their BA in English—Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2026, and received the 2026 Ron Wallace Poetry Thesis Prize for their collection Technobrat. They spent four years working overnight shifts at the undergraduate research library on campus and will happily tell you all about it while trying to course correct their crippling caffeine addiction. When they’re not writing poems about girls on the internet, Hannie enjoys having 90-minute conversations about pop culture minutiae, reading tarot for their friends, and wistfully imagining a world where Fugazi still played live shows. 

Rose Rea (FC) is a writer and artist from Richmond, Virginia. She graduated from VCU during the pandemic with a B.A. in English and minors in religious studies and creative writing. Since then, she has worked in a health food grocery store, delivered and arranged wedding florals, manned the reference desk at a public library, and waited a billion tables. Friends and family have said her stories are "dark" but "funny." She is inspired to write them by human belief systems, dreams and memories, Robert Altman films, and country music. Her work aims to be kinetic and adaptable—she likes making zines, performing fiction as theatre, collaborating with other artists, and finding new ways to experience art and storytelling as a community.

Gabrielle (Gabby) Robbins (CNF) grew up in Mount Pleasant, a small town in East Texas. She earned her BA from the University of North Texas in 2018 and taught freshman English for five years at Mount Pleasant High School before returning to UNT to complete her MA in Creative Writing. Her work typically gravitates toward themes she’s still trying to make sense of: the intoxicating ache of growing up, the intimacy and undoing of girlhood, the search for belonging, and the enduring influence of hometowns and literature. Her favorite aspect of the essay form is its capacity to somehow bring her influences and interests—such as Emily Dickinson, A Separate Peace, Yellowjackets, Girl Meets World, and Taylor Swift—into conversation with one another.

Jesse Sorrell (PY) grew up swimming across waters, attended Kenyon College as an undergraduate, and received a Master of Divinity from Wake Forest University School of Divinity. The past decade he offered spiritual, emotional, and bereavement support in emergency, hospice and palliative care settings until poetry said cute, and. Poetics float him between haunt and desire where poems map queer new worlds. He loves a proper sweat in the sauna but please do not invite him to a cold plunge. Find him where there are stars, trees and water. Where there are animals wild in our loving.